Internet Explorer Validation and QA Toolbar

The goal of the IEQABar project is to integrate web site
validation and quality assurance facilities into Microsoft
Internet Explorer for Windows.

It will, unlike other extensions, not depend on online
services like the W3C MarkUp
Validator, but rather ship with the neccessary tools. It
will allow to either validate the current page as loaded into
your browser with a single click or automatically validate all
pages you browse to and immediately show the results in the
toolbar.

Why IEQABar is better

Beeing integrated into Internet Explorer, the toolbar offers
a number of benefits:

It works for any document you browse to, whether on your
local hard drive, behind the corporate firewall, sites
requiring authentication, personalized sites, responses to
form submissions, ...

It works without a network connection, no additional site
traffic, no additional internet connection fees, no privacy
or security risks, simply zero network traffic.

It makes you immediately aware of minor errors introduced
when updating your site, no need for validation links to
simplify re-validation, no complaints from your visitors that
your pages don't validate, since you know well before them
and fix it without getting blamed.

Why IEQABar is even better

Not convinced yet? Ok, there is more. As currently designed,
it is based upon two open source toolkits, OpenSP which is featured
in the W3C MarkUp
Validator, and HTML
Tidy. Suppose you browse to a document like the
following:

Internet Explorer will then load this XML document and
transform it using the specified default.xslt into
a fancy report (
compare it to the W3C MarkUp Validator).

This
approach makes the output fully customizable to suit your
needs. You would probably like to have different output if you
are going to paste the results into a mail or usenet posting,
hide specific error messages, add links to other quality
assurance services, or just change the style sheets to your
favourite color scheme.

You will also note from the XML document above that OpenSP
(and thus the W3C MarkUp Validator) is unable to detect the
invalid width attribute but HTML Tidy reports the
obvious error, using both tools you can make your documents
truely valid!

How IEQABar could be even better

Tidy unfortunately does not detect some other errors, it
would for example silently recover from an unquoted attribute
value like in <font
color=#ffffff>...</font> and it considers a
legal empty <strong> element which it would
trim as serve an error as improperly nested elements.

You can also see that processing the fairly simple document
with OpenSP takes about 0.2341 seconds (on not quite up to date
notebook) while Tidy finished processing the document already
after 0.0024 seconds which is more or less insanely fast. The
difference is less significant for large documents, but Tidy
still outperforms OpenSP by numbers. Hence it would be an ideal
solution to update Tidy to report all the errors OpenSP
detects, but who is going to implement that?

Using the same tools as the W3C MarkUp Validator behind the
scenes has another downside, you will get the same error
messages as over there. Currently. There is nothing to stop us
from improving it! Except OpenSP, of course. Nevertheless,
rewriting some error messages and proving a hint here and there
can greatly improve the usability as other tools like the
WDG HTML
Validator kindly demonstrate.

For XHTML documents it might be an option to rely on one of
the various XML toolkits, Internet Explorer 6 for example
already ships with Microsoft's
MSXML 3.0 toolkit, which, believe or not, has more XHTML
validation capabilities than the W3C MarkUp Validator, which
correctly points out that is has only limited XML
support.

Other, possibly better, options include Xerces-C or libxml, as they, unlike MSXML, are
able to recover from well-formedness errors. Suppose you forgot
to quote two attribute values and omitted two
</p> somewhere, you would probably have to
validate the document four times to spot and fix all the
errors. But are the error messages from these tools actually
more helpful than OpenSP's?

How IEQABar looks like

Let's browse to the homepage of the Keio University, one of the three
W3C host organizations, and to CPAN:

As you might guess, the red cross indicates that the
homepage is
actually invalid while the other one, CPAN, is valid. Clicking on the
Validate button takes you the a report as shown above.
Clicking on the little arrow next to it reveals even more
features that a so tremendously cool that this needs to be kept
a secret, not even I know about it. Ok, actually I did not
implement anything there. Not yet. Which gets us to a
problem:

How to get IEQABar

There is source
code in CVS which can be compiled following
my instructions (you need the free Visual
C++ Toolkit 2003), but be ready to be disappointed, it's a
command line application. Fully functional, but unfortunately
not a toolbar which this project is all about. I've got toolbar
code, but it's too much of a hack to publish it. Speaking for
myself here, since I am already involved in maintenance and
development of the W3C
MarkUp Validator, the W3C CSS Validator,
HTML Tidy, ... I
probably won't have time to change that, and my co-developers
currently neither. This project, and all the beforementioned
projects, need your help!

How to contribute to IEQABar

Ok, here some ideas:

Someone with Win32 GUI/COM skills is needed to write the
toolbar code, do it yourself, find someone who does it, find
someone to find someone who does it, etc.

C++ developers are most welcome even without GUI/COM
skills!

Look at the ugly icons in the toolbar, I am sure you can
do a better job

You happen to be a web author? Hey, you could maintain
this web site!

Isn't it odd that this web page is written in english but
the screenshots show a german version of Internet Explorer?
You can take screenshots!

You consider yourself a Web Designer and think you can do
a much better layout than what I already considered fancy? Chime in and show us a
demo!

You've got brilliant ideas about what features the
toolbar should offer, how to design the GUI part, or any
other idea you would like to share? Great! You are most
welcome!

...

I am sure everyone can contribute a little to this project.
Please do. There are two mailing
lists, ieqabar-devel and
ieqabar-users, just subscribe, say hello and tell
us why you subscribed!